Please read the enclosure and send on to Comrade Alsky
for a study by him and members of the People’s
Commissariat for Finance Collegium, and then on to Comrade
Kamenev, chairman of a commission which will probably
deal with the matter as
well.[1]

I first met Chebotaryov in the 1880s, in the case of my
elder brother, Alexander Ilyich Ulyanov, who was hanged
in 1887. Chebotaryov is undoubtedly an honest man. In the
epoch of the first revolution and after he was politically a
Cadet, but not an active one. I believe that his honesty
can and must be relied upon. He now seems to be
politically close to Smena
Vekh.[2]

Notes

[1]A reference to a report from I. N. Chebotaryov, a member of
the Governing Committee of the State Savings Banks before the
October Revolution, addressed to the Chairman of the Council
of People’s Commissars on November 7, 1921. Chebotaryov said
there was need to reopen the state savings banks in order to
attract money in the hands of the population.

The savings banks wore established by a C.P.C. decision of
December 26, 1922 (published in Izvestia VTsIK, December 29,
1922).

[2]Smena Vekh (Change of Landmarks)—a weekly journal published
in Paris from October 1921 to March 1922 by a group of
whiteguard émigré intellectuals, which also issued a collection entitled
Smena Vekh in Prague in July 1921. The Smena Vekh trend was
named after the collection and the journal. Realising that it was
quite hopeless to overthrow the Soviet power through foreign armed
intervention, the Smena Vekh followers came out in favour of
co-operation with the Soviet power in the hope of its degeneration
into a bourgeois state. Some of them were honestly desirous
of promoting Russia’s economic rehabilitation.